The Siege: 68 Hours Inside the Taj Hotel (32 page)

‘Hello. Who is there?’ she asked tentatively. A man’s voice answered. ‘Hello, Florence, my name is Roshan.’

Roshan. She did not know a Roshan. She presumed it must be a Taj technician calling from another part of the world since the Data Centre dealt with the Taj globally. Did he not know that the hotel was besieged? ‘Roshan, now’s not a good time,’ she whispered.

‘Listen, don’t put the phone down.’ He sounded determined, she thought. ‘Just tell me, are you stuck in the Data Centre? No one can work out where you are. Faustine says you are missing. I used to work in the Data Centre too. I know every inch of it.’ He had heard
about Florence through a friend who knew Faustine, and he wanted to do whatever he could to help father and daughter.

Florence perked up. ‘Oh, thank God. Thank you, Roshan. I am fine, but please get me out of here. The door has gone and I am choking.’ She did not really understand who he was, but she liked the tone of his voice. ‘Look, Roshan, if they kill me . . . I mean, they want to.’ Her mouth was dry and her empty belly grumbled. She could think in sentences but only half of it came out of her mouth.

‘Keep calm, Florence,’ Roshan said. ‘I will stay on the line until someone finds you. Florence. Are you still there?’ She cradled the phone as the song came back into her head, and she began to sing to Roshan: ‘
Hey Shona, Hey Shona
[O sweet one, O sweet one]’.

Outside the hotel, the TV cameras caught Karambir Kang unawares. Unshaven and haunted, he stood with Ratan Tata, whose grandfather had built the hotel. Chairman of the Tata group, the conglomerate that owned it, Tata had been at home when the attacks had begun and was advised to stay there while the police worked out what was going on. Instead, he had come straight down and waited half a night, barely sleeping, incredulous, as flames wreathed the family’s jewel. ‘I
cannot
believe the hotel is burning down,’ Tata said to whoever was in earshot. ‘It is just not possible.’ Karambir Kang stared into the inferno too. His eyes were red. And in that brief second, as he craned his neck, the cameras trained on him, his misgivings were on show. A giant man looked as if he were made of straw.

The centre of the blaze seemed to be the exact point where his family’s apartment was located. The TV was reporting that a firestorm had engulfed the top floors, consuming everything in its path. The gunmen had hauled guests from their rooms, keeping them prisoner elsewhere in the Taj, the TV anchors said, bludgeoning some in full view of the CCTV cameras, sending a message to police that they were impotent.

Earlier, Neeti had done what her husband advised her: locking herself and the boys in the bathroom of their apartment and blocking any cracks with wet towels. With Uday huddled up beside her,
she had cradled Samar, stroking his hair. It was hard to believe that only a few hours previously, the boy had been talking on the phone to his grandfather in Bahrain. ‘Samar, I’m coming to Bombay soon. Will you let me sleep in your bedroom with you?’ Of course, Samar had replied, happily.

A Taj executive came over and put his arms around the General Manager’s broad shoulders. ‘All we can do is just hope and pray that Neeti and the boys have been taken hostage and are not in the suite.’ Only the southern side of the sixth floor was burning, he pointed out. If they had made it to the other end of the building there was a real chance they would be found alive.

Karambir took a few moments to walk down to the seafront, where a soft, salty breeze blew in. Looking out to the horizon, he called his parents 3,000 miles away in Bahrain, where they were visiting his sister Amrit. ‘I don’t think they’ve made it,’ he told his father, his voice cracking. If Neeti were alive she would have found a way to stay in touch. Nothing had been heard from her for an hour. ‘Be a brave Sikh,’ his father told him. ‘You are an army general’s son,’ he continued, recalling how his boy had been an enormous baby at eleven pounds, someone who had grown up on his father’s war stories in a succession of army compounds. The infant Karambir had loved nothing better than to be driven around in the army staff car and his father had wanted him to become a soldier too. What could he tell his son now? He handed the phone to Karambir’s mother. ‘I can’t save them,’ he told her. ‘Then go and save the others,’ she replied gently. ‘You are a brave boy.’ Both of them were weighed down by loss.

Eventually, Karambir spoke again. ‘I will be the last man here,’ he pledged. He thought back to the family’s rushed breakfast routine that morning, their last shared moment. The hotel which had consumed so much of his life had now taken them from him for ever.

He rang off and turned back to face the stricken hotel, the flames reflecting in his eyes. He saw incredulous and terrified faces in the crowd that was watching as well. Karambir Kang had to find the strength to carry on.

Up in her Malabar Hill apartment, Savitri Choudhury studied the chilling Taj pictures too. Nothing had been heard from Sabina for several hours now. There was something she needed to do. She called Shantanu: ‘I am watching Sabina’s room go up in flames. She can’t get out of there. You know that, right?’ Shantanu was still in Delhi, unable to fly until dawn. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Make your peace. Call her and say goodbye.’

Up in the Rendezvous Room, the diners from Souk and the Korean conference delegates were anxiously watching the Palace burning far below them, when a message came up from the Taj’s security chief, Sunil Kudiyadi. ‘The MARCOS have gone into the Palace wing. It’s time for you to get out.’ Across the eastern horizon, the first hint of dawn was turning the sky oyster grey.

Bob Nicholls, the private security chief, gathered his team of ex-commandos and Ravi Dharnidharka, the US Marine captain. Defending the Rendezvous Room had been straightforward: boxed into a citadel, with the lifts jammed and the fire exits sealed. But descending more than twenty floors with a large crowd of agitated diners, with kitchen implements as their only weapons, was perilous.

‘In the Marines we like to say, “Don’t take a knife to a gunfight”,’ Ravi said, as much to himself as anyone else. Earlier, when they had passed through the kitchens, he had not gone looking for weapons like the others, worrying about the false hope kitchen knives brought. Most of the diners were already on tenterhooks. Some were falling to pieces. Then there were his relatives, whom he had a duty to protect while maintaining a safe distance. The Korean trade delegation, with their faltering English and complete incomprehension about how the subcontinent worked, were strung out.

Ravi had still not told anyone he was a US Marine, as ideal a hostage as the gunmen could hope to find. He also privately worried that Nicholls’s team seemed a little gung-ho. That might have been a pilot’s prejudice; his eye filtered through the Harrier’s cockpit,
calculating the odds within fractions of a second from thousands of feet up. A commando was a different kind of warrior, smelling whatever he was about to overwhelm, getting as close to it as the rules of engagement permitted.

There was one thing they agreed on: Ravi and Bob’s team could see why India’s Western Naval Command had been reluctant to send in the MARCOS. The marine commandos would have no experience of urban warfare. The Taj would be as alien to them as a foreign land. Now they were in, they would do well to even find the terrorists in this pitch-black, smoke-filled labyrinth. ‘The wrong team is facing down embedded terrorists who have controlled the hotel for many hours,’ said Ravi. Bob agreed: ‘They will be lucky not to kill each other.’

In the crow’s nest, it was decision time. Kudiyadi had advised them that the MARCOS had no plans to come up the Tower, and at best would act as a decoy in the Palace wing. Bob’s team could use this diversion to slip through. Ravi liked the idea, having believed all along that their best hope was ‘not having to fight’. Bob relayed the message to his men. ‘A coordinated, slow-mo evac,’ he told the crew, warning that 150 civilians would need careful managing. ‘What about the police?’ someone asked. Couldn’t they help? Bob shook his head and switched on the PA. ‘If we are going to get out, we have to do it ourselves,’ he announced. The room was silent. Stepping outside without armed backup was a terrifying proposition to the civilians.

‘No rescue is near,’ Bob stressed, relaying a warning from Kudiyadi: ‘All power will be cut once a certain number of floors are ablaze, so we will become trapped above the fire line.’ Ravi suspected that their chance of getting out if the fire spread into the Tower ‘was about zero’. The diners agreed to evacuate and Bob rang Kudiyadi on the staff radio: ‘Come up if you can.’

They would send down the civilians, ten at a time, with a minute in between, women and children up front. ‘We will
all
get down,’ Bob reassured them. Ravi looked at the cousins and uncles he had not seen since he was eighteen years old. How did they come to be
here on
this
night? You could not calculate the odds. Getting up the courage to excavate his past had been a leap. Finding the time in between America’s wars to travel to India had been a struggle. They had only ended up at Souk at the last minute, while other family members had plumped for Tiffin in the Oberoi’s lobby. In the last hour, he had been hearing terrible stories of how it had been shot to pieces by gunmen.

Bob addressed everyone: ‘We don’t know where these gunmen are, so we have to be silent.’ If Bob was getting his information from cable news, they should presume the terrorists were doing the same, so no phone calls. ‘Shoes off.’ Everyone should be ready to jog or run in silence. ‘All loose change out of your pockets.’

Privately, Ravi had listened hard to the soundtrack of what was happening below and completed an aural inventory: a mixed cache of AK-47s, small arms, probably 7.65mm or 9mm, grenades and, most worryingly, some kind of high explosive. This showed just how hybrid this Mumbai raid really was. To Ravi’s way of thinking it combined the random terror of an Islamist outfit that sought to cull civilians ruthlessly, the kind of slaughter whipped up in Fallujah by Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, with the skills deployed by amphibious commandos like the US Marines. ‘All we have to do is
evade
the enemy,’ Ravi reiterated.

He felt a tap on his shoulder. A smartly dressed man was worried his elderly mother would not make it down the fire escape. ‘Leave me behind, please,’ Rama Parekh, aged eighty-four, implored. Ravi shook his head. ‘We’re not leaving anyone.’ He suggested a chair. ‘We will take turns to carry you.’

The barricades were dismantled piece by piece: furniture, cushions and sections of the Rendezvous stage. As Ravi lifted down the last upended table he heard movement outside in the stairwell. ‘Holy shit,’ he said under his breath, turning round to Bob, who stood holding a meat cleaver. It could be one of the gunmen for all they knew. Gingerly, Ravi opened the door and saw two frazzled and sweaty security men in black suits, armed with radios. ‘Sunil!’ shouted Bob, rushing forward to greet the security chief, Kudiyadi.
As they entered, they brought the smell of fire and gunpowder with them. Horrified guests stepped back.

The doors swung open, allowing the beaters to go ahead, scouting the porthole windows on each landing. These looked into every corridor and were potential kill zones. The forward units would try to provide a continuous assessment of risk, fed back through the convoy of diners, the first detachment of which was about to be dispatched down the stairwell. The commandos crept down, the fire escape walls sticky to the touch as the daytime humidity gave way to a cold, dry night air. They were within a foot of the landing and then in full view of the dimly lit corridor ahead. They clambered down the next flight. Nothing moved. The Tower was like a ghost ship, with the hotel management having contacted most of the guests, warning them not to come out until they were called by name.

‘If something is moving,’ Bob said, ‘presume it’s not friendly.’

The first scout came back, drenched but happy. ‘Nothing to report.’ Bob counted off the first pod of ten diners, Ravi making sure his family was among them. As they crept down a bitter smell filled their nostrils. Soon a flexible column was snaking down and almost immediately someone’s mobile phone rang out. Bob turned around to hush them and saw the Koreans were loaded down with their shoes and conference goody bags. How the hell were they going to keep this procession under control?

A clatter of rounds echoed up from below and the line sharply concertinaed. Had the advance party encountered somebody? ‘The shots are away from us in a corridor,’ reassured Bob, relaying the whispered information back. ‘Please keep moving.’ Ravi, at the rear, had had to abandon the chair. He could not swing it round the sharp angles of the fire escape and instead hitched Rama Parekh over his shoulder like a coal-sack. She clung on, silent. She’s a toughie, he thought as he descended.

After what seemed like hours, Bob reached the single digits and then the fifth floor, which reeked of burning carpets. With every step they were getting closer to the gunmen and here the fire escape abruptly ended as the modern Tower met the top of the original
Palace wing. ‘Where do we go now?’ He assumed that the fire exit would coil around the Tower to the ground floor, but the scouts ahead reported that it crossed an open corridor. The column of terrified civilians would have to run the gauntlet along a floor that had not been cleared: a perfect sniper’s trap.

They readied the crowd in the stairwell. ‘We have to go.’ Bob urged those around him to remain silent, wondering what other obstacles lay head. How, for example, were they going to signal their presence to the Indian security forces to avoid a blue-on-blue slaughter? Kudiyadi had been in constant touch with the police, but had the message got through? Bob felt queasy. ‘We are going to have to break into the open with hands raised, and then gallop.’

Everyone cleared the 50-metre-long corridor without incident and edged down another few flights, until they came up against a fire door. Was this it? It seemed too soon. They had to open the door to prevent a crush. But then, which direction to run in? Bob was no longer sure of their orientation. Ravi shuffled up the line and with a final heave threw back the exit to see two army
jawans
(constables) sitting on the pavement, smoking and with their rifles in the air. As they looked up in surprise, Bob grimaced. They were out, at the back of the Tower, facing Bombay Yacht Club.